Crater Lake National Park | How do you save a lake — twice?

Summary

A short written summary of the episode — not the full transcript. Press play above for the whole thing.

“Excuse me, sorry to bother you, but there’s a newt.”

That is Little, working a diner in Bend, Oregon, table by table, the morning after our day at Crater Lake. The rest of her pitch is that the newt lives in one lake in the whole world, the crayfish are eating its babies, and we need a thousand signatures. The man she asked said: where do I sign.

The thousand is not a random number. In 1870 a sixteen-year-old named William Gladstone Steel was in Kansas eating a sandwich wrapped in newspaper, and the wrapper carried an article about a blue lake in Oregon nobody had measured the bottom of. It took him fifteen years to find out where the lake was. At thirty-one he wrote about a thousand letters to newspaper editors. He started a petition. He wrote a whole book and mailed it to the cabinet. His bills died in 1886, 1887, 1888, 1889, 1891, 1893. Timber companies wanted the trees. Ranchers wanted the grazing. Seventeen years after he first stood on the rim, Roosevelt signed.

Little heard the number and made it ours. Big wanted to know what happened to the men who kept killing the bills, and whether anybody remembers their names now.

This is the homeland of the Klamath Tribes, who call the lake giiwas, a holy place. The newt is a Mazama newt and it exists nowhere else. Fish were stocked in the lake in 1888, fourteen years before there was a park. Signal crayfish were put in after, deliberately, as food for the fish. The crayfish eat the eggs and the larvae. In 2008 newts turned up at half the survey sites. In 2025 they turned up at two of them, five percent.

So a small lab is keeping a species alive outside its only lake, buying time while somebody works out the crayfish. One of the scientists said the thing that stopped Big cold: her hope for the future is that they succeed and then are not needed anymore.

Most people in the park said yes. A few asked good questions. Some said no, which is allowed.

Big keeps asking how many signatures we are at now. The answer changes every few days.